How Long to Write a Booker Prize Novel?

blue seaHow long does it take to make a Booker Prize novel? “Seven years.” If you ask Kiran Desai, the 2006 Man Booker Prize winner with her novel The Inheritance of Loss, that will be her answer. Here’s the excerpt of her interview with India newspaper The Hindu during her South Asia tour for promoting her book:

How has the Booker changed your life?

There has been a total transformation. I kept my mouth shut for seven years [during which she wrote The Inheritance of Loss]. Now all I do is talk. (laughs)

The last time we spoke — which was a few days before you won the Prize — you had said that you planned on working on another novel by the end of the year. But a recent reported datelined Galle, suggested you were worried that there may not be another novel in you.

I did not say anything close to that. What I said is that I don’t know what I am going to do next. It’s always true for me … the process of writing reveals the book to me. I have to sit on my desk and the process reveals the book. I never know in advance. And this is always a risk. You don’t know what is going to come out. I may not work. So I probably said something to that effect.

I didn’t know whether this book [The Inheritance of Loss] would work … whether there would be enough material to put it all together. And surely any writer worries what is going to come next.

Is there a germ of an idea already?

Not really. But a shadow of something that is perhaps pretty much unconscious. But I do want to sit at my desk again. Kiran Desai Kiran Desai Photo by Bhagya Prakash K./the Hindu
I kept my mouth shut for seven years [during which she wrote The Inheritance of Loss].